Video conferencing and collaboration are used by a limited number of businesses worldwide due to its high costs, dedicated hardware, heavy use of bandwidth, and complexity.
While video conferencing devices are typically based on the H.323 standard to ensure interoperability, devices made by different manufacturers are still not always able to “talk” to each other during a video conference or other collaboration session.
The advent of the Internet, but especially the increase of available bandwidth on the network, combined with the increase in computational capabilities of computers and mobile devices, has allowed the creation of software capable of video communication, using “low-cost” devices compared to the H.323 systems. These software programs have allowed video conferencing to spread to a much wider audience and, more importantly, heterogeneous devices. There are a great number of hardware devices that can be turned into a “video device,” able to encode audio and video locally and decode/play back audio and videos received from remote locations.
Thus, there are now two worlds: those with low cost/low quality software-based solutions, and those with high cost/high quality hardware based solutions. These two worlds are usually isolated, as companies often purchase software only solutions for employee desktops, and high quality solutions for executive meetings/conference rooms.
There remains an unmet need for a single software solution that may cover both requirements, i.e., offer “low cost” and “high quality” at a much lower cost than hardware solutions, allowing users to connect from any device to the same meeting.
To accomplish this, the software needs to ensure that each participant enjoys the best possible quality based on the capabilities available to the participants, such as the hardware devices in use and/or the type and quality of the network link.
In addition, traditional video conferencing applications require high bandwidth connections which limit the mobility of participants. The bandwidth available and network irregularities (e.g., latency and jitter) in cellular, satellite and other wireless data networks make traditional solutions unsuitable or usable only in very limited areas.
Thus, there remains a need in the art for improvements in the mobility of video conferences and collaboration sessions.